Chapter Twenty-Seven
TOREN
The smile is the worst part.
Not the blood on his teeth. Not the calculated calm in his eyes. Not even the knowledge that I walked right into this like the predictable fool he's always believed me to be.
It's the smile.
Because it tells me that nothing that follows is going to be clean.
The silence stretches for three, four, five seconds, the kind of silence that has a weight and a texture to it, the kind you feel pressing against your eardrums. Carnage is still held back by Halo and the others, his chest heaving, the vein in his neck standing out.
Scott and his men have gone very, very still.
And Masen just sits there in that chair, bleeding and smiling, like a man who has already won.
I am so tired of underestimating him.
“How many?” I ask. My voice comes out quieter than I intend, stripped down to something cold and flat.
Masen tilts his head, the way he used to when we were kids and I'd asked a question he thought was beneath him. “Enough.”
“How many men do you have outside this building, Masen.” I don't ask it this time. I state it. I hold his gaze and I don't blink and I watch the way his expression flickers just a fraction, just enough. When he realizes the girl who used to tremble in front of him isn't here anymore.
“More than you can handle.” He leans back as much as the restraints will allow. “You might want to call your guard dog off, Tor. If he keeps hitting me, they're going to start getting twitchy out there.”
Carnage makes a sound low in his throat that isn't quite human.
“Carn.” He stills at my voice, but the fury rolling off him is a physical thing, thick enough to choke on. I don't look at him because I can't afford to, if I see his face right now I'll lose the thread of control I'm barely holding. “Step back.”
A beat of silence.
“Step. Back.”
The sound of him moving away from Masen is the only confirmation I get.
I take three steps forward until I'm standing directly in front of my brother.
Close enough to see the shadows under his eyes, the hollowness in his cheeks.
He's been running. Whatever performance he's putting on right now, whatever trap he thinks he's sprung, he's been running too. He just hides it better than I do.
Always has.
“Here's what I think,” I say, keeping my voice level.
“I think you have men outside. I think you planned this, let yourself be found, set this whole thing up so you could sit there looking smug while I walked into your trap.” I watch his face, watching for the small tells I spent my whole childhood learning to read.
“But I also think you didn't plan on Scott's people getting here as fast as they did. I think the timetable you set in your head is already running short and you are sitting there trying to decide if your men are going to hold or cut their losses.”
Something moves behind his eyes.
There it is.
“You always did talk too much,” he says.
“And you always underestimated me.” I crouch down to his level. I need him to look at me, really look at me without the performance. “I'm not asking you to surrender, Masen. I'm not asking you to get on your knees. I'm asking you to look me in the eye and answer one question.”
His expression doesn't change. “And if I don't?”
“Then I stop asking questions and start making decisions you won't like.” I hold his stare. “Where is Father's second?”
The air in the room shifts.
It's subtle, barely anything at all, but I have spent enough time in rooms with dangerous men lately to know what it looks like when someone's mask almost slips.
Masen's does.
Just for a second. Just long enough.
And in that second, the bottom falls out of my stomach.
I hear Vivian's voice in my head from weeks ago.
Every lead dissolves. Every name leads to a wall.
I hear Ezekiel, exhausted and frustrated, telling me the trail had gone cold again.
I hear Pope running through the cartel's financial structure like a maze with no exit, coming back empty handed every single time.
I think about all those sleepless nights. All those dead ends. The way I kept telling myself I was missing something, that someone was deliberately keeping the second invisible.
Someone was.
He's been sitting in front of me this entire time.
“It's you,” I breathe.
Masen says nothing.
The silence is the confirmation.
“It was always you.” The words come out slowly, like I'm pulling them up from somewhere deep.
“That's why we couldn't find anything. That's why every name, every number, every thread we pulled came apart before we could trace it back to anyone. Because they all led to you and you made sure they never would.” I stare at my brother.
This person I grew up with. This person I defended, adored and grieved over.
This person I have been going to war against and I feel something I wasn't prepared to feel.
I feel stupid.
Genuinely, gutturally, humiliatingly stupid.
Not because I didn't see it. But because some part of me, some stubborn, desperate, idiotic part of me, didn't want to.
“You weren't hiding from Steven.” My voice comes out, barely above a whisper. “You weren't his heir waiting to take over. You were already running it. You've been running it. How long?”
Masen holds my gaze for a long moment.
The betrayal I feel is so gut wrenching I can’t even describe it.
Kellan and Cas had no idea, they thought he was innocent like I did, until the night of the crash.
I always believed my father was trying to mold my brother into a perfect NHL player and make the world fall in love with him.
Turns out, Steven was trying to put his son in the spotlight so no one would ever expect the golden boy from Somerset to be dirty.
He exhales slowly through his nose and the performance finally, fully drops.
What replaces it is worse.
Because what replaces it is just him. Stripped of the cruelty and the swagger and the smug performance. Just my brother, sitting in a chair with blood drying on his chin, looking at me the way he hasn't since we were children.
Like I'm actually worth looking at.
“Since I was seventeen,” he says.
The number hits me like a physical blow. Seventeen. He was seventeen years old.
“Steven built the network,” he continues, his voice flat and factual in the way it gets when he's decided to tell the truth and can't afford to feel it while he does.
“He was meticulous about it. Compartmentalized everything. No one person knew more than their piece. But he needed someone who could see the whole board, someone he trusted to hold it all together without being visible.” He pauses.
“He chose me. Spent two years teaching me everything before he ever let me touch any of it.”
“You were seventeen,” I say again, because I can't seem to move past it.
“I was seventeen and I was good at it.” There's no pride in his voice. There's nothing in his voice. “It was never about the cartel, Tor. I didn't want the power or the money or any of that shit. I wanted him to see me.” His jaw tightens. “Turns out that's your weakness too.”
The cruelty of it lands exactly where he intends it to.
Because he's right. He is absolutely right and we both know it. Two children raised by the same absent, demanding, corrupt man, both of us contorting ourselves into whatever shape we thought would make him look our way. Masen chose to become his weapon. I chose to become invisible.
We were both wrong.
“Did you know?” I ask. I have to. Even though part of me is terrified of the answer, I have to know. “When they took me. When they put me in Walter House. Did you know what he was going to do before it happened?”
The silence stretches long enough to tell me everything before he opens his mouth.
“I knew the night before.” His voice is quieter now.
“He told me it was damage control. That the evidence was going to bury the family name and the accident gave him a window to—” He stops.
Starts again. “I told him not to. For what it's worth, I told him it wasn't necessary, that we could manage the fallout another way.”
“But you didn't stop him.”
He doesn't answer.
He doesn't need to.
“You didn't stop him,” I say again, and this time it isn't an accusation.
It's just the truth, laid out between us on the floor like something neither of us can step around.
“You were running the cartel and you let him lock your sister away for a year for a crime you committed and you—” My voice breaks on the last word.
Just once, just for a second, before I find it again. “You let me rot in here, Masen.”
“I know.” Two words. Hollow and absolute.
“Why?”
He looks at me for a long time. “Because I was a coward,” he says.
“Because I had spent so many years building something for him that walking away from his decision would have meant admitting that everything I'd done, everything I'd become, was for a man who was never worth it. Don’t forget it was supposed to be me and your boyfriend that died that night.” His throat works.
“It was easier to tell myself you'd be okay.
That it was temporary. That he'd pull you out before—” He cuts himself off.
“Before what?” I press.
He shakes his head.
I let it go. Not because I forgive it. I don't. I may never forgive it. But because I can feel the clock ticking and I can hear Halo moving through the building and I know we are running out of time for the conversation I actually need to have.
“The men outside,” I say, pulling myself upright, pulling myself back into the war. “They're yours. Not Steven's. Not loyalists waiting to find out who comes out on top. They're yours.”
Masen nods slowly. “They've always been mine. Steven thought he ran things. He ran the face of it, the political cover, the money laundering. The actual machinery—” He glances at me. “That was me. No one knew it was me, not Kellan or even Cas. Just Steven.”
“Which means when I take down the Kellar Cartel,” I say, watching his face, “I'm not taking down the ghost of our father. I’m taking you down.”
Something flashes in his eyes. Not fear. Something older and more complicated than fear.
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
Halo appears in the doorway before Masen can answer, his face carved into that careful blankness that means the news isn't good.
“Movement on the perimeter.” His voice is quiet and certain. “Multiple vehicles. Lights off.” His eyes find mine. “It's not Alex's people.”
The cold moves through me like water.
I already know before I ask. I think some part of me has known since the second we pulled into this building, since the moment I crossed that threshold and felt the ghost of every nightmare this place ever gave me pressing against my skin.
“Devlin's men,” I say.
Halo nods once.
Of course.
Of course he's here. Because that is the immovable, infuriating, devastating constant of my life, that no matter what war I'm fighting, no matter what ground I manage to take or what ground I lose, Xaden Devlin is always somewhere just outside the frame of it, pulling at threads I don't know he can reach.
I press my hand flat against my stomach. One second. Just one.
Then I lift my chin.
I turn back to Masen and I look at my brother—really look at him—for the first time in longer than I can remember.
The blood on his face. The exhaustion underneath the performance.
The ghost of the boy who was seventeen years old and so desperate to be seen that he handed himself over to a monster and called it ambition.
“You have about thirty seconds to decide,” I tell him quietly.
“You can sit there and wait for Xaden's men to come through that door and let him decide what happens to you. Or you can stand up, walk out of here beside me and tell me everything you know.” I hold his gaze and I make sure he hears every word.
“I'm not offering you forgiveness. I'm not offering you absolution, a clean slate or any of that.
What I'm offering you is a chance to do one right thing.
Maybe the first right thing you've ever done.” My voice drops.
“I'm offering you the chance to help me end this war and take down the bitch who helped our father and Xaden’s.”
Masen stares at me.
The sounds of cars outside grow closer.
Carnage steps up to my left. Halo to my right. Scott and his men fill the room behind me. And I stand here in the building that was supposed to finish me, in front of the brother who let it happen, and I wait.
Masen's throat moves.
Then slowly, painstakingly, like a man setting down something he's been carrying for half his life, the fight goes out of his shoulders.
“Get these restraints off me,” he says quietly.
I look at Scott.
Scott cuts the zip ties.
Masen rolls his wrists and stands. He's not as tall as I remember him being, or maybe I've just stopped making myself smaller around him.
He looks at me for a moment with an expression I can't name and don't want to examine too closely, because if I do, I'll feel something I'm not equipped to feel right now.
“I know where every one of Steven's accounts are,” he says. “Every supplier, every contact, every dirty cop and politician on the payroll. Every piece of leverage he ever collected.” His jaw is tight. “All of it including his dealings with Meekan and Fiona Williams.”
I nod once. “Then let's go.”
He falls into step beside me.
And for the first time in two years, I walk out of my nightmare with my brother at my side.
I don't trust him. I don't forgive him.
But I know that the war I've been fighting in the dark just found its first real light.
And I am done being predictable.